Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

[Ranulf]

Ok, I love this guy. I honestly can't tell if he's a paid promoter for gearbox/pitchford or nvidia or both.

Edit: steam forum link:

Borderlands® 4 :: Steam Community

steamcommunity.com

"Ah, the holy trinity of cope:

“Fake pixels”
“Fake frames”
“Lazy devs”

There’s no such thing as a “fake pixel”.

There are:
-Rasterized pixels
-Ray traced pixels
-Reconstructed pixels
-Upscaled pixels
-And now: AI-predicted pixels.

All of them hit your panel. All of them are real. If your frame buffer gets written, your screen refreshes, and your eye sees it - it’s not “fake.” You just don’t like how it got there. That’s not fakery. That’s progress without your permission.

“Fake frames”

Yes. Frame Generation interpolates motion between rendered frames. But guess what? Every monitor you’ve ever used does the same thing - by ghosting, doubling, or blur smearing. Frame Gen just does it better, in hardware, with AI motion vector math. You’re mad because it works - not because it’s fake. Frame Generation is motion fluency - without a framerate tax. The only fake thing here is your outrage.

“Lazy devs”

Oh yes, devs are so lazy now:
-Photoreal assets
-Ray traced lighting systems
-Nonlinear narrative engines
-AI pathfinding across destructible terrain

... but sure, let’s call them lazy because your GTX 1060 can’t brute force nanite geometry at 1440p. Unreal Engine 5 isn’t “lowest common denominator” - it’s just beyond your denominator. You’re not upset at pixels or engines. You’re upset because you don’t understand the rendering pipeline anymore. You’ve been left behind. Now you post Reddit-tier grievances on Steam and hope someone else is still in 2017 with you."

I'd like an order of AI-predicted pixels with a side of shiny traced rays to go please. Oh and toss in one of those toy spatulas to flip my Nvidia flapjacks like Uncle Jensen likes to make for investors.

Will we see some six fingered AI generated characters in Borderlands 4.5, the search for more performance dlc?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Nvidia workers (or hopeless groupies) using technical arguments to tell the world why Nvidia needs to "cheat" the rendering pipeline rather than improve their raster and raytracing capabilities from the ground up. Such fun to read!

 

[GaiaHunter]

"Ah, the holy trinity of cope:

“Fake pixels”
“Fake frames”
“Lazy devs”

Real latency.

 

[Vikv1918]

Nvidia workers (or hopeless groupies) using technical arguments to tell the world why Nvidia needs to "cheat" the rendering pipeline rather than improve their raster and raytracing capabilities from the ground up. Such fun to read!

To be fair to the hardware vendors, it seems to be more of a Jevons Paradox scenario. A $300 budget GPU today has 10 times the raw horsepower of a PS4 and yet companies struggle to build games that can run at 1080p 60fps on it. If GPUs became much stronger, it would just result in companies spending even less time optimizing and adding more assets and effects to make their game look prettier.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If GPUs became much stronger, it would just result in companies spending even less time optimizing and adding more assets and effects to make their game look prettier.

It's also majority of gamers being stupidly more forgiving and going into debt to afford GPUs. The industry needs to make sure that a 60 series GPU must be targeted for 1080p Ultra, 70 series for 1440p Ultra, 80 series for 4K Ultra and 90 series for 8K Ultra, all at 60 fps minimum. If the game studios don't follow these guidelines, gamers should boycott their games until they do.

 

[coercitiv]

There's two I words I have observed to be used in the public discourse:

• "fake" in relation to frames and pixels (negative connotation)
• "transformative" in relation to new IQ tech or techniques (positive connotation)

It seemed to me that the negative commentary was slowly fading off and getting replaced with the positive takes, especially after a constant media push. I certainly did not expect to see such a strong reaction rekindled by a game like Borderlands 4, which AFAIK was very well received outside of the technical issues. People say it's a great game even in their negative Steam reviews, negative because it plays like crap. They really like and want to play the game, which made it all the more aggravating when the most important rep of the developer tells them to just suck it up.

Example of positive review to see the contrast between gameplay loop and technical issues:


If I had to guess, Borderlands 4 has a bigger problem than performance and stability. It's art style cannot be defended with the usual "transformative" talking points. It doesn't benefit from fancy tech in the same way other games do. This robs the developer of a powerful shield against criticism, and Randy Pitchfork (typo intended) certainly managed to pour gasoline where he saw smoke.

 

[marees]

It's art style cannot be defended with the usual "transformative" talking points.

They shouldn't have used Lumen & virtual shadow map for a cartoony game. Everyone is now saying borderlands 3 looks & plays better

 

[jpiniero]

They shouldn't have used Lumen & virtual shadow map for a cartoony game.

WYM? The lighting looks great.

 

[marees]

WYM? The lighting looks great.

Is it better than borderlands 3 ?

 

[jpiniero]

Is it better than borderlands 3 ?

Dunno. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reason BL4 is heavy tho.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

To be fair to the hardware vendors, it seems to be more of a Jevons Paradox scenario. A $300 budget GPU today has 10 times the raw horsepower of a PS4 and yet companies struggle to build games that can run at 1080p 60fps on it. If GPUs became much stronger, it would just result in companies spending even less time optimizing and adding more assets and effects to make their game look prettier.

Good stuff. Links lead to the eventual Gate's Law version -

- Gates's law ("The speed of software halves every 18 months"[9]) is an anonymously coined variant on Wirth's law, its name referencing Bill Gates,[9] co-founder of Microsoft. It is an observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by 50% every 18 months, thereby negating all the benefits of Moore's law.

My backlog of games is my solution to the problem. By the time I get to BL4 it'll run well on an APU.

 

[igor_kavinski]

By the time I get to BL4 it'll run well on an APU.

I can totally believe that. I was amazed to see Half Life Lost Coast running well on a Haswell U series iGPU. That demo made so many poor gamers cry.

 

[WelshBloke]

Is it better than borderlands 3 ?

It is. I'm not sure it'll look massively better than BL3 after the settings have been turned down to get it to perform the same though.
But that's fair enough I guess as I'm comparing them both running on the same hardware.

I'm ok with games not running at the highest resolutions and at max settings at extremely high framerates on even the tip of the line hardware.
That's always been the way, and that's what always made it exciting to get new hardware! I think that now game visuals are so good that we don't get wowed by new stuff anymore and we expect everything to run as well as the old stuff even if it looks better.

 

[Ranulf]

Gaming industry guy, programmer I think, weighs in and defends Randy somewhat. The golden age of gaming section is hilarious, basically saying old games ran at 30 and barely at 60 so whats the big deal? This takes the inflation argument to a whole new level. Its not $250 or $500 for top end graphics, its now $2k and you can't maintain 60fps at 4k.

 

[gdansk]

Borderlands simply does not look like a game that needs a high end graphics card.
Any money they invested in making it run like crap was a misinvestment no matter how unreal the future may be.

Secondly, DLAA is simply better than DLSS. But notably that also has crap frame rates on a 5090 at 4K. I want developers to target good DLAA frame rates on launch day for $2000 cards, not developers catering for DLSS performance today and DLAA at 4K 6 years from now. Who knows how much that Nvidia GPU will cost. It'll be way beyond my price range.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Gaming industry guy, programmer I think, weighs in and defends Randy somewhat. The golden age of gaming section is hilarious, basically saying old games ran at 30 and barely at 60 so whats the big deal? This takes the inflation argument to a whole new level. Its not $250 or $500 for top end graphics, its now $2k and you can't maintain 60fps at 4k.

He's an idiot.
There shouldn't be any reason for a partially cell-shaded game like Borderlands to run like shite.

 

[coercitiv]

Industry pushes 4K and high refresh gaming. After a while they get bored and decide 1440p 50Hz with mild stutter is the true cinematic experience.

 

[jpiniero]

Borderlands simply does not look like a game that needs a high end graphics card.

And it doesn't. After all it runs on the consoles just fine.

 

[gdansk]

And it doesn't. After all it runs on the consoles just fine.

So it seems, I haven't played it there.
But ultimately, I think adding a graphics preset that 5090s can hardly run was a waste of money. Unless Nvidia paid them to do that, I don't see why companies should spend money adding a graphics preset that will piss off gamers and doesn't look better.

 

[adroc_thurston]

After all it runs on the consoles just fine.

it doesn't.

 

[jpiniero]

it doesn't.

Looks like there's some memory leaks but from the footage I saw it does generally run at 60 fps until the leaks show up.

Alas it doesn't look anywhere near as good as it does on PC. Cuz they cut the settings down.

 

[jpiniero]

should spend money adding a graphics preset that will piss off gamers and doesn't look better.

There's def not a small contingent that's mad and would rather the max settings be worse if their PC can't handle it.

 

[gdansk]

There's def not a small contingent that's mad and would rather the max settings be worse if their PC can't handle it.

I'm pretty sure you're right, it is a small contingent. But at the end of the day the game doesn't look good and runs like a smoker. You can tune it and it will look mainly the same and run better. But it's still very questionable allocation. Almost as if it were a sponsored title adding low impact effects at the behest of a card pusher. Ah, well it is.

UE5 sucks but you know why these options are there. It's to get people to keep DLSS on. And to try FG. The more a game needs those then the more advantage they have over Radeon. In Nvidia's ideal world every game would use these. But that's not the ideal world for every game. And a game that looks like this ain't ideal.

 

[Saylick]

So it seems, I haven't played it there.
But ultimately, I think adding a graphics preset that 5090s can hardly run was a waste of money. Unless Nvidia paid them to do that, I don't see why companies should spend money adding a graphics preset that will piss off gamers and doesn't look better.

*laughs in Crysis 64x tessellation*

 

[coercitiv]

There's def not a small contingent that's mad and would rather the max settings be worse if their PC can't handle it.

The same big contingent of people who were mad at CP2077 for introducing PT settings that no GPU in existence can handle?